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| Queen Mary 2’s Britannia Restaurant |
When we booked our trip home from Europe on the Queen Mary 2, we had a bit of concern over being confined to a ship for 7 days. There are, after all, no shore excursion options in the middle of the North Atlantic. Such fears proved entirely unfounded. In fact, my original intention for our blog series on the QM2 was going to be similar to our Cruising the Aegean blogs, to include a daily account. But I abandoned my daily log after just a couple of days, as I simply didn’t have time to keep on top of it.
Instead, we’re going to blog on a few of the big activities that occupied our time and attention for those seven days, without regard to when we enjoyed them. And we’ll start with one of the principle activities of any cruise, one that Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 particularly excels at: eating.
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| Britannia Restaurant Grand Staircase |
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| Queens Grill First Class Dining |
Cruises on the Queen Mary 2 follow the old-school formal English cruise traditions, with assigned tables and formal nights. This used to not be our style of travel, but apparently with a little age we’ve decided dressing up can be fun. All passengers on the Queen Mary 2 are assigned a specific table in either the grand Britannia Restaurant or the “first class” Queens Grill or Princess Grill if you’re fortunate enough to stay in one of the QM2’s beautiful suites. We, you can imagine, dined in the Britannia Restaurant, but we can assure you it was sufficiently swanky. Also, when you book a Cunard cruise, you get to specify whether you want a table for two or to be assigned to a group table: we opted for the romantic setting of a table for two.
Though it’s not required that you eat in your assigned dining room every evening, we did. Instead, we could have dined in the Kings Court buffet, or we could have ordered room service. Similarly you can enjoy breakfast and lunch in your assigned restaurant or exercise any of your options. There are a couple of other choices, such as the Golden Lion pub. After only a day aboard, we settled into a routine with only a couple of variations: room service for breakfast, buffet for lunch, and the Britannia Restaurant for dinner. Like most cruises, all meals are included in your fare, so how and where you dine is pretty much up to you.
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| The Kings Court Buffet |
Some of our most memorable meals were our last night’s surf-n-turf dinner of lobster and filet, a salmon wrapped in a phyllo pastry, a scrumptious veal, a delicious stuffed duck breast, and several fish options. Each meal was accompanied by tasty appetizers (including vegetarian and healthy options) and was wonderfully finished with dessert and coffee. Often we snap a picture or two of our meals while traveling, but our plates on the Queen Mary 2 didn’t last long enough for it to occur to us to snap a picture.
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| High Tea Service |
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| The Parade of Chefs in the Britannia Restaurant |
Also worth mentioning is the afternoon tea service. High tea is served every afternoon at 3:00pm, complete with crumpets, scones, and white-gloved servers. With all the other avocations on offer, we only went to high tea the afternoon dancing was also offered, but so enjoyed it we wish we had gone another afternoon or two. There’s always next time.
